Some stories begin with grand gestures. In While We Wait by Durjoy Datta, the story starts in the most ordinary place, like an airport queue where two strangers strike up a conversation while waiting for the people they love.
***
Raghav.
I can feel the steam rising from people’s bodies around me. They are losing patience, their pulses quickening, their weight shifting from one foot to another. They are looking over their shoulder and hoping that the line in front of them moves quicker. People with hope. I hate that. I envy that. Hope should come from logic, not optimism. Which line have we ever been in moved quicker than we anticipated? I used to be like them. But that was before today. Hope’s nice, like a toy. But real life runs on being real. It’s in the phrase. I don’t know how I missed that for so long.
I want to tell everyone in the line that it’s going to take as long as it does. You’re just bitter, everyone will tell me. But I’m also happy. Can I be both bitter and happy?
‘Hey? Can you move ahead?’
I step forward. I want to tell her that we moved one tiny step, and that no one has moved away from the counter. We are still the same number of people in this line, but I’m still doing what Megha says I have started doing a lot—misplacing my frustration.
‘One more step,’ says the girl in a dark grey T-shirt two sizes too big, and a pair of jeans that are way too balloony, and over her shoulder is a backpack bursting at its seams.
This time I want to tell her off, but before I can say anything, her phone beeps and she begins to text. Phones are a great way to cut a conversation you don’t want to have. And common sense says she shouldn’t have a conversation with me. She’s 5’1” and I’m 5’10”, and the way we’ve broken the world, those numbers alone are reason enough for a girl to think twice before speaking to a man, even in a public space.
So I don’t move.
She looks up from her phone.
‘If you move up,’ she says, ‘there’s a fan there.’ She points to the one hanging precariously over the signboard that says, ‘Visitor’s Tickets, Delhi Airport’. She continues brightly, ‘The sooner you get there, the quicker you can stop sweating.’
She points to the rivulets of sweat pouring down my forehead and sweat patches forming under my arms. Fucking embarrassing. But I usually don’t stink. That’s because I already know I sweat like a pig and invest heavily in deodorants. But maybe she can detect a stink. She looks the kind—petite with a sensitive nose. I step away from her, move closer to the man ahead of me, and take a deo out from my backpack.
I’m about to spray it when she says, ‘My fiancé has the same perfume. I could smell it on you.’
‘So I’m not stinking?’
‘Why would you think that?’
She’s on her phone again. The line moves and now I’m right below the fan and the air is cool and I get what she meant. The line moves once more, but I’m still looking at her, still thinking if I should spray the perfume or not, when the cashier slaps the cool marble ledge and calls out to me. ‘Haanji?’
When I turn back to face him, he looks at me with irritation and outstretched hands. ‘Cash, 200 rupees. No UPI.’
‘But I only—’ ‘Only cash. Did you not hear? Next.’
‘I will pay,’ says the girl from behind me. ‘Two tickets, please.’
Before I can say anything, the girl has opened her bag, fetched two notes and paid. Tickets in our hands, we are politely shoved out of the line by the people behind us.
‘If you can give me your UPI details—’ She cuts me with a smile.
‘You can buy me a chai inside. Or a water. Whatever is 200 rupees. Or whoever you’re meeting can pay me back. Whatever suits you.’
‘Sure,’ I say to the girl who has somehow helped me twice in a matter of minutes. ‘Thank you for the . . . fan thing? And for helping me pay.’
‘You call that help? Are we calling basic decency help now?’
She’s walking away from me now, and I follow her. I feel like I should be talking to her, to make up for the stubbornness of not moving two minutes ago.
‘Who have you come to receive?’ I ask her.
Her face is suddenly even brighter. ‘My fiancé.’
Fiancé. The word warms my heart. So weird that a word can hold so much power. I’m thinking of Megha now. Her opened boxes in our new apartment. Those framed pictures of ours which we will put up together in the evening because she doesn’t trust me with their positioning.
‘You?’ she asks. ‘Fiancée too,’ I answer, savouring the word.
***
Get a copy from Amazon or wherever books are sold!
